Transcript of “Mess and Gaum”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hey, this is Marcus from Kingsport, Tennessee. How are you today?
Great, Marcus. Thanks for calling.
So, as kids, my sister and I, we would hear our mother make a statement, a phrase that she loved to say, usually in exasperation.
But she would say, you kids, all you ever want to do is mess and gom.
Oh, that’s such a strange word, gom.
But usually it was said after she had finished cleaning the kitchen, and my sister and I had left snacks or crumbs or whatever.
But years later, probably as a teenager and a little more brazen, I challenged her.
I said, that’s not really a word.
You’re just making that up.
And no, no, this is a word.
I’ve always heard it.
I said, well, how do you spell it? Well, I don’t know. Maybe G-O-M or G-O-M-B, but I don’t really know. And I said, okay, prove it. Look it up and show it to me in a dictionary. And she grabbed a Webster’s or an Oxford dictionary and couldn’t find it. And so I said, see, I told you, it’s not a real word.
Years later, I was probably in college or maybe out of college, she had been reading a series, a fictional series, and she found – it was printed in one of these series books.
And it was kind of set in the mid-1800s, westward expansion, pioneers, that sort of thing.
And she came, and she felt so vindicated.
Look, here it is.
It’s printed in this book.
I have a suspicion that it’s probably Irish or Scottish in its history, its origins, because that’s where most of our ancestors came from.
They immigrated from that part of the world, Ireland, Scotland, England, immigrated into the Carolinas and Virginia, and then migrated over the mountains into eastern Tennessee.
So that’s what I’d like to talk about.
Fantastic. Well, this certainly chimes with what we know about the word gom and the phrase messing in gom. And it sounds like you all were maybe messy little kids, huh?
Yes.
Yeah. And if you’d looked in, for example, specialty dictionaries like the Dictionary of Southern Appalachian English or the Dictionary of American Regional English, you would have found this word gom, G-A-U-M. And it’s, as you suggested, it’s spelled a couple of different, several different ways. G-O-M, sometimes G-U-M, sometimes G-O-M-E. And since the 19th century or so, it’s meant a greasy or sticky mess. It might even have to do with the grease on an axle, but we’re not totally sure about that. Its origins are a little bit murky, but it might also be influenced by the word gum. But by 1859, you see citations like, don’t let her gom herself all over with molasses, or the baby is all gommed up with molasses. And it’s sort of a word that sort of sounds like what it is, isn’t it? Yeah, definitely. In Ireland, and the word gom as a verb can mean to be stupid or mope about.
And as a noun, it’s a foolish looking person.
So it’s negative in general.
I know that my mother intended it to be negative.
She was not happy when we were messing and gomming.
Messing and gomming, yeah.
Well, this is great.
She’ll be pleased to know that she’s vindicated and that it truly is a word.
I appreciate it.
Thank you very much.
We appreciate it.
Take care now.
Yeah, watch that messing and gone now.
Bye-bye.
Thanks.
Bye-bye.
All right.
Take care.
Email words@waywordradio.org.
